Resumo de Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes received a Pulitzer Prize in literature in
1997, increasing the demand for personal memoirs in the literary
marketplace. Frank McCourt recalls
scenes of his destitute childhood in
impoverished Ireland
with a dogmatic Catholic upbringing, complete with illiterate parochial schooling with corporal
punishment and constant bullying. Like any good storyteller who spins a yarn,
he knows to begin at the beginning, reinventing the conditions in which he was
born. Angela, his luckless mother, was
determined to be useless to her family and
shipped off to America,
the land of dreams, in order to have a better future. Istead, she arrived in New York,
had a knee-trembler with Malachy McCourt
in a speakeasy which resulted in a pregnancy and shotgun wedding. The
consequences of two irresponsible partners
is predictable, resulting in a cycle of misery and poverty with an abundance of
unkempt children and babies arriving off
the production line.

The extended family in New York
find the couple a financial burden and impossible to support. The unwanted
McCourts are shipped back to Ireland
where they can possibly live off the government dole. However, upon arrival,
adjustment into Irish society is not easy as the parents belong to rival clans
and Frank is viewed as a Yankee at school.

Misery loves company, so cuddle up with this book to follow
Frank through his many misadventures through drizzling rain, dogmatic
Catholicism and flooded government houses that lack of basic sanitary
resources. Malachy more adept at drink
than drudgery has little interest in work or maintaining the support of his
family. The kids are sent out to gather
coal along the railroad tracks in the brutal chill of winter and Oliver dies for the lack
of an onion to make him a healthy broth as an antidote to pneumonia. Angela, suffering the premature death of her
children, is defeated by the poverty
that surrounds her and the irresponsible nature of her husband. Without the
strong support of her family, she vainly tries to keep Malachy in restraint by
collecting his payment at the plant.
Malachy squanders his money in the pub before Oliver's funeral and gets
drunk with Eugene's coffin sitting
on the bench in a pub. Frank lives in a
world of confusion in which he doesn't
undrstand why his sister and brothers are nailed into boxes and buried in the
ground. The answer given to his insistent questions is that Oliver has gone to
heaven, but nobody seems to know where that is. The driver for the carriage arrives to take Eugenes
coffin, but even he is drunk an stumbles on his way to the graveyard. The misery of existence becomes farcical as Frank searches for means
of survival to withstand the constant trauma of his childhood with conditions
so deplorable that he contracts typhoid.

His parents, immured by poverty, and irresponsible as a
result of emotional and social defeat, ignore the symptons until Frank lies at
death's door. A public threat, Frank is quarantined in the local hospital.
Through the near miraculous recovery, Frank realizes the desperate situation of
his life and strikes back for personal survival. He recognizes with contempt the
irresponsibility of both parents and decides to
overcome the destructive poverty surrounding him. By accident he begins
by helping distribute newspapers which leads him by chance to reading for Mr.
Timoney. With the realization of earning his own money, he becomes financially
independent of his indigent parents. Frank systematically develops his financial resources until his mother is
dependent on him. Disgusted by her degradation and by the stench of poverty coupled
with corrupt Catholicism, Frank abandons
Ireland for
steamship passage to America,
land of his dreams where entrepenuerial
skills are rewarded.

Frank McCourt's narrative of his impoverished childhood
couples misery with roaring laughter. Althougnostalgic, the narrative is not
sticky, but presents sharp criticism of
a theocratic society that preaches against birth control, but offers
little or no support to impoverished families overwhelmed by debts incurred by
prolific offspring. Raised with inplicit belief in Catholic dogma, Frank gets
forbidden Celtic heroic myths confused in the battle of good and evil. When the
world is in chaos and his father
recovering from yet another drunken night, Frank seeks the reassuring
counsel of the Angel of the Seventh Step
which deserts him after his recovery from typhus. Frank's battle with typhus
serves as the bridge between childhood and adulthood in which he re-assesses
his world and critically evaluates his position within society and realizes
that he does not like the stigma of indigent poverty. His father, Malachy,
serves as the foil for the riotous, rollicking narrative of success.

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